After his epic four year adventure around the world in the exploring ship HMS Beagle, a young Charles Darwin returned with specimens and sketches, notes and ideas and set to work revealing a new story of human origins that would forever change the way we view ourselves; a new evolutionary picture within which all the puzzling pieces of human behavior were beginning to fit.
Sigmund Freud took up the torch, exploring the dark subterranean caves of the mind. Larger than life, a psychological revolutionary, and an unstoppable force of nature himself, Freud knew that we can’t understand ourselves without first appreciating our instinctual drives (and the pleasures that are fueling them) vs the internalized superego (or religio-cultural forces that are opposing them). There’s no denying his pioneering contributions to the foundations of modern psychology but his vision was obscured, and his theoretical freight train derailed, by his fixation on sexuality, and addiction to cocaine.
Pierre Janet was one of the first to discuss traumatic dissociation and the dis-integration of memory systems/self-states, and the fragmentation of the personality structure. Janet said that: “Traumas produce their disintegrating effects in proportion to their intensity, duration and repetition.”
Carl Jung (who studied under Janet and corresponded with Freud) was a gifted clinician, and brilliant observer/researcher who developed a simple word association test with which he was able to measure the effect of unconscious emotional core-memories on conscious behavior. In ‘Studies in Word Association’ Jung wrote: “Certain complexes arise on account of painful or distressing experiences of an emotional nature which leave lasting psychic wounds behind them. A bad experience of this sort often crushes valuable qualities in an individual.” He said: “Emotion is the chief source of all becoming conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.”
Jung found empirical proof of our unconscious history affecting our conscious performance. He found that emotionally intense experiences from a person’s (and a people’s) past were still implicitly operating behind the scenes, affecting thinking and behavior. In ‘Boundaries of the Soul’ Jungian June Singer explains that: “Jung was willing to consider and probe the early history of the child, not as an end in itself, and not even to discover clues leading back to traumatic events that, being repressed, acted to sensitize points in the psyche which would form the grounds for later psychic disturbances. His major interest in infantile experience was to discern in it patterns which, established at a very early age, proceeded to give form to future thought and behavior.”
Alfred Adler was more intrigued by power dynamics and dominance in relationships and what he called the inferiority complex. He was one of the original social or inter-personal psychologists looking at how we are influenced by our relationships with our parents/caregivers and teachers. He got people thinking about things like birth order and also developed a typology that presaged the attachment styles. Use of power in your relationships is a core central trait that determines whether you are dominant or submissive. Many others were also growing increasingly frustrated and disillusioned with the psycho-analytic approach, which required over-elaborate, highly-contrived interpretations to force dreams and memories to fit into Freud’s rigid and faulty theoretical frameworks.
B.F.Skinner was also frustrated with Freudian psycho-analysis but he was looking for something alot more concrete and observable, and he found what he was looking for in Pavlovian conditioning. Skinner trained small creatures like rats and pigeons to do strange things using simple reward and punishment conditioning and reinforcement. He extrapolated from his research and observations to try to explain human behavior and develop a new approach to changing problematic behavior. This empirical logical approach made Behaviorism so popular that this second wave swept across the field of psychology. Behaviorism, however, was too mechanistic, based as it was on animal models, it didn’t and couldn’t account for the rich emotional-social dimension of human life that really motivates people. But reward-punishment conditioning was widely recognized to be a vital piece of the puzzle.
The third wave in psychology was the Humanist movement championed by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, also know as the person-centered approach, they rejected the determinism of psychoanalysis and the reductionism of behaviorism and instead allowed for greater freedom and individuality, and placed the human front and center directing the course of therapy while building an empathic therapeutic alliance together within which the person could be validated and assisted to accept themselves and then begin to change their self-concept. Rogers focused on empathy and care. The only problem is that genuine empathy cannot be taught and so this approach depends alot on the personality of a Rogers or a Maslow rather than on techniques that could be replicated, but it sure got people thinking, or rather, feeling.
Aaron T. Beck came to realize that by helping people to reframe their faulty automatic thinking and core beliefs they were able to make genuine lasting progress. Being rational and measurable the cognitive revolution gained a massive following and became the next movement or fourth wave in psychology. The Cognitive Model was found to be effective at treating several different disorders. In ‘Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders’ Aaron T. Beck wrote: “This new approach to emotional disorders changes man’s perspective on himself and his problems. Rather than viewing himself as the helpless creature of his own biochemical reactions, or of blind impulses, or of automatic reflexes, he can regard himself as prone to learning erroneous, self-defeating notions and capable of unlearning or correcting them as well. By pinpointing the fallacies in his thinking and correcting them, he can create a more self-fulfilling life for himself.”
There was also a leap forward in technology and new methods of looking at the brains of humans and animals to gain a better understanding of how neurons connect, and how neural networks grow, and how our experiences and choices shape our physical brains. Since they developed together and informed each other, we should actually refer to it as the Cognitive-Neuroscience Revolution. Daniel J. Siegel, Jaap Panksepp and many others blazed a trail into the unknown parts of our minds, but some, being highly incentivized by the pharmaceutical industry were more motivated to understand the intricacies of the brain so that they could develop lucrative “quick-fix” medicines that manipulate a particular mechanism of the mental machinery, rather than appreciate the emotional and social interventions required to change dysfunctional circuitry.
Many Cognitive Behavioral Therapists (CBT) emphasize the importance of Emotions but then don’t really know how to work with this hidden third leg of their model (without which it cannot stand), the silent partner that wasn’t deemed important enough to make it into the CBT acronym. They were getting closer to what really motivates people and drives their psychology and personality, but they didn’t know how to “deal” with these emotional schemas. The erroneous conviction that “thoughts create emotions” wasn’t helping either. Enter Daniel Goleman with ‘Emotional Intelligence‘ and Leslie Greenberg and Susan Johnson with Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) ~ the fifth wave or revolution ~ placing emotion at the foundation and core of our memory systems, showing how emotions generate both cognition and behavior.
